So-called tape streamer drives have been known as drive apparatuses capable of performing recording/reproduction of digital data on magnetic tape.
Such tape streamer drives have enormous storage capacities of, for example, from several tens to several hundreds of gigabytes, depending on the tape length of the tape cassette media. Consequently such drives are utilized in a wide range of applications, such as backups of the data recorded on the hard disk or other media of computers, and are also well-suited to storage of image and other data with large data sizes.
In such tape streamer drives, the magnetic tape is made to travel with the tape wound over a rotating drum through a predetermined wrap angle; in addition, the rotating drum is rotated, and by using a magnetic head on the rotating drum to perform recording/reproduction scanning using a helical scan method, high-density recording can be performed. Hence as is well known, data are recorded such that there are successive tracks in the length direction on the magnetic tape, formed so as to have a predetermined inclination angle with respect to the length direction.
Then, in the above tape streamer drives, a recording error may occur by reasons of, for example, a damage existed in an area on the magnetic tape or deterioration of S/N in recording data.
In such a case, for example, recording is retried and the recording of data is again carried out at the same recording position. Alternatively, the recording (rewrite) is newly performed on another area of the magnetic tape, while the area where the recording error occurred is treated as a dummy track (frame).
The above described method of performing retry or rewrite is effective when the recording error is caused by a damage on the magnetic tape which is the recording medium. However, in the case where a recording error is caused by the deterioration of S/N itself, there is a high probability that the error occurs again when recording the data even after performing retry or rewrite, since the S/N itself of the recording data has not been improved. Accordingly, under the situation in which the S/N of the recording data is deteriorated, there may be a problem of difficulty in appropriately recording data by merely performing retry or rewrite.